Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Evangelist
November 13 · d. 1836
also known as Charles Simeon of King's College, Charles Simeon of Cambridge
Charles Simeon was the evangelical clergyman who for fifty-four years was vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge, and became the father of a movement that carried gospel preaching through the Church of England and out to the mission field. Converted as a Cambridge undergraduate in 1779, he preached the whole Bible to hostile pews until the parish was won, trained a generation of ministers, helped found the Church Missionary Society, and left the church the sermon outlines of his Horae Homileticae. His feast is November 13.
Charles Simeon was born at Reading, in Berkshire, in 1759, and sent as a boy to Eton and then to King's College, Cambridge. He was clever and well-off, fond of fine horses and fine clothes, and had given God almost no thought at all. Then, a few days into his first term in 1779, the college gave notice that all the undergraduates were required to receive Holy Communion. The order frightened him. He knew enough to know that he was in no fit state to come to the Lord's table, and he had three weeks to prepare.
So he prepared in the only way he knew, by reading. He read what he could find about the sacrament, and the reading only deepened his distress, for it showed him a holiness he did not have and could not manufacture. In Passion Week he took up a book by an old bishop, Thomas Wilson, and came on a sentence about how the Jews of old had laid their hands on the head of their sacrifice and so transferred their sin to it. The thought struck him like light: if God had provided such an offering, then he might lay his own sins on the head of Jesus and be rid of them. He seized it. Day by day through that holy week his hope grew, and on Easter morning he woke early with the words on his lips, "Jesus Christ is risen to-day! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" From that hour peace flowed into him, and it never left.
He was ordained, and in 1782, at twenty-three, he was made vicar of Holy Trinity Church in the middle of Cambridge. He would hold that one church for the rest of his life, fifty-four years.
It did not begin well. The parish had wanted another man, and it did not want Simeon or his earnest gospel. The people who rented the pews locked them and kept the keys, so that the best seats stood barred and empty while those who came to hear him had to stand in the aisles or go home. Simeon set benches at his own expense in the open spaces, and the churchwardens carried them out and threw them aside. For a while the parish would not even let him give the Sunday afternoon lecture in his own church. A lesser or a prouder man would have found an easier living and gone. Simeon stayed. He preached to whoever would stand and hear, he visited the sick, he waited, and he did it not for a year or two but for more than a decade, until the hostility wore itself out and the same church that had barred its doors was crowded to hear him.
What he preached never changed. He opened the Bible and let it speak, aiming, as he put it, "to humble the sinner, to exalt the Saviour, to promote holiness." He would take no theological system as his master, Calvinist or Arminian, but tried to preach the whole of Scripture even where its truths seemed to pull against each other. And he did not keep his ministry to the pulpit. On Friday evenings he gathered undergraduates into his rooms for what he called his conversation parties, answering their questions and teaching them how to open a text and preach it; he held classes in the making of sermons; he poured himself into the young men who would be the next generation's clergy. The university had a mocking name for them, the Simeonites, or simply the Sims, but the Sims went out into parish after parish across England, and the plain gospel preaching that Cambridge had once locked out of Holy Trinity went with them.
One of those young men was Henry Martyn, who became Simeon's curate at Holy Trinity. Simeon had spoken to his circle of the good being done in India by William Carey, a shoemaker gone out to preach, and the fire caught in Martyn; he gave up everything, sailed east, and spent his short life translating the Scriptures into the languages of India and Persia before he died at thirty-one. Simeon had helped to found, in 1799, the missionary society that became the Church Missionary Society, and he lived to see men he had trained carry the gospel to the ends of the earth.
Near the end of his life he gathered the fruit of his preaching into a great work he called the Horae Homileticae, sermon outlines on every book of the Bible, thousands of them, so that a young minister anywhere might have help to preach. Through all of it he kept a strange and deliberate lowliness. Cheerful before other people and tireless in his labour, he schooled himself to walk humbly before God, wanting, as he said, his hand on his mouth and his mouth in the dust. When he died in 1836, after fifty-four years in the one pulpit, the shops of Cambridge closed and a great crowd followed him to his grave in the chapel of King's. The parish that had locked its pews against him had long since been won; the men he had trained were scattered through the church at home and across the sea; and the gospel he had laid hold of one Easter morning, that a sinner may lay his sins on the head of Jesus and go free, was still being preached in a thousand places by the sons of his labour. He had opened a door in Cambridge, and it did not close.
How we know Charles Simeon is, for a figure so recent, exceptionally full. He lived and died in the age of print, in the most watched university in England, and he left papers of his own. The principal source is the Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Charles Simeon, edited by his friend and successor William Carus and published in 1847, eleven years after his death; it is built on Simeon's own journals, letters, and recollections, and preserves his account of his conversion in his own words. Alongside it stand the twenty-one volumes of his Horae Homileticae, the later Life by Handley Moule (1892), afterward Bishop of Durham, and the ordinary Cambridge record of a public man whose every year in the town was noticed and written down. Little here rests on legend; the difficulty is not scarcity but abundance.
The outward facts are secure. He was born on 24 September 1759 at Reading, educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, where he was elected a fellow and held that fellowship for life. He was converted in the spring of 1779, over the weeks in which he prepared for the compulsory college Communion; in the Memoirs Carus prints Simeon's own telling of it:
In Passion Week, as I was reading Bishop Wilson on the Lord's Supper, I met with an expression to this effect: that the Jews knew what they did, when they transferred their sin to the head of their offering. The thought came into my mind, What, may I transfer all my guilt to another? Has God provided an Offering for me, that I may lay my sins on His head? Then, God willing, I will not bear them on my own soul one moment longer.
He was ordained deacon in 1782 and priest in 1783, and in 1782 he was made vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, a charge he held until his death fifty-four years later. The early opposition is not a pious exaggeration; it is reported plainly in the sources. The pew-holders barred their seats, the afternoon lectureship was withheld from him for years, and the resistance ran through most of the first decade before the parish came round. The nickname Simeonite, and its clipped form Sim, was fixed on his followers in his own lifetime, sometimes in mockery, and it stuck.
On the disputed ground between Calvinist and Arminian that divided the evangelicals of his day, Simeon refused to take a side. In the preface to the Horae Homileticae he set down his settled view, that "the truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes"; he wanted his hearers to be Bible Christians rather than system Christians, following Scripture even where its lines would not resolve into a scheme. His legacy is easier to measure than most. The Church Missionary Society, which he helped to found in 1799, became the largest Anglican missionary body of the century; the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, which he helped to establish in 1809, carried his concern for the Jewish people; and the trust he set up to buy the right of presentation to church livings, so that evangelical preachers might be secured in parish pulpits, still bears his name and still holds patronage in scores of English parishes. Few clergymen of the Church of England have left a mark so wide or so lasting.
Charles Simeon is commemorated on November 13, the day of his death, in the calendar of the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church, and he is honoured across the Anglican Communion as the father of its evangelical tradition. He is buried in the chapel of King's College, and in Holy Trinity Church, where he preached for fifty-four years, his old parishioners set a tablet in the chancel wall, near the memorials of his friends Henry Martyn and Thomason. It names his one ambition, and borrows the words of Saint Paul to do it:
In memory of the Rev. Charles Simeon, M.A., Senior Fellow of King's College, and fifty-four years vicar of this parish; who, whether as the ground of his own hopes, or as the subject of all his ministrations, determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified.
His name is still carried by Simeon's Trustees, the patronage trust he founded, which continues to appoint clergy to evangelical pulpits in more than a hundred and sixty English parishes; and Ridley Hall, the evangelical theological college founded at Cambridge in 1881, stands in the tradition of ministerial training that he began in his rooms at King's. Above all he is remembered as a preacher and a maker of preachers, the man who taught the Church of England's evangelicals to open the Bible and let it speak.
Horae Homileticae (Discourses in the form of skeletons upon the whole Bible), Vol. 1(English, 1832-1833)
Simeon's life work: sermon outlines on every book of the Bible, some 2,536 in twenty-one volumes, gathered from fifty-four years of preaching. The preface states his threefold aim ("to humble the sinner, to exalt the Saviour, to promote holiness") and his refusal to bend Scripture to a system.
Public domain: Internet Archive (Vol. 1, with preface)
Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Charles Simeon(English, 1847)
The indispensable first source, built on Simeon's own journals, letters, and recollections by his friend and successor; it preserves his conversion account in his own words, the truth-in-both-extremes statement, and the humility sayings.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Charles Simeon of Cambridge(English, 1977)
The standard modern life, thorough and sympathetic, the best single book for a reader who wants the whole man.
Public domain: Wipf & Stock (publisher), Internet Archive (borrow)
Charles Simeon(English, 1892)
The classic believing biography, by the future Bishop of Durham; shorter and more devotional than Hopkins, a small classic of the genre.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Primary sources. Simeon's own mind is best met in the Horae Homileticae (21 vols., 1832–1833), the sermon outlines on the whole Bible into which he gathered a lifetime of preaching, and whose preface sets out his threefold aim and his refusal of system; it is free at the Internet Archive. His conversion, his letters, and his conversation survive in William Carus's Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Charles Simeon (1847), also free at the Internet Archive, the indispensable first source for the man himself.
Recommended modern biography. Hugh Evan Hopkins's Charles Simeon of Cambridge (1977) is the standard modern life, thorough, sympathetic, and still the best single book for a reader who wants the whole man; it is in print from Wipf & Stock. For a shorter and more devotional portrait, Handley Moule's Charles Simeon (1892), by the future Bishop of Durham, remains a small classic of believing biography and is free at the Internet Archive.
Further reading. John Piper's chapter on Simeon in The Roots of Endurance (Crossway, 2002) is a warm, accessible appreciation built around his endurance under opposition. Simeon's own Evangelical Religion (1837) is a compact statement of the churchmanship he stood for, free online at Project Canterbury.
Online resources. The full Horae Homileticae and Carus's Memoirs are at the Internet Archive; Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org) hosts several of Simeon's sermons and addresses.
British (Received Pronunciation): Homileticae /ˌhɒm.ɪˈlɛt.ɪ.siː/; Horae /ˈhɔːr.iː/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Charles Simeon to preach the Gospel to the people of every nation: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.